The Three Ts

Translation

Google Search for Translators,

Andraž Repar

Google Search is the most powerful search engine in the world. It uses unbelievably complex algorithms to search an unprecedented amount of data. If used correctly, it can find just about anything. The challenge for translators is how to harness its power to their benefit. This presentation will show you how to set up Google Search for translation work, how to use it to find better terminology or check stylistic preferences in a particular language, as well as a few other tips and tricks to improve your Google Search workflow.

Free Translation Tools,

Miran Željko

There are many free translation tools available on the Internet that can significantly simplify repetitive translation tasks. This presentation will give a practical demonstration of some of these tools. Thus the participants will be able to use the newly acquired knowledge in their daily work right away.

World of Project Managers,

Alen Stanič

The focus of the lecture is on the relationship between project managers and translators and why a good relationship is important for both sides. Its aim is to give translators a deeper insight into the world of project managers and offer them a view from the clients’ perspective. Topics: why some things are done the way they are, why a good project manager can save you a lot of time and nerves, how you can implement similar solutions on your side, hints and tips on how to improve your working processes and save time, do’s and don’ts, how to become the »preffered translator« etc.

Psychology of time management,

Ana Arzenšek

Translating is an activity with numerous and usually tight deadlines. Therefore, one of the key skills in the work of professional translators is time management. Managing time means to deal efficiently with the tasks, duties and roles at work and in personal life. Time management requires knowledge of time management techniques. But people are generally much less aware of the importance of personal (psychological) factors in time management. Participants will discover several psychological factors and interpersonal differences in time management: Procrastination, Locus of control, Self – efficacy, Motivational factors. The secondpart of the lecture will consist of an illustration and explanation ofsomeof the individualtechniquesof time managementbased oncase studies. During the lecture, participants will learn abouttheir own ways offunctioningin situationswith limited time.

Technology

Statistical Machine Translation Talk,

Mihael Arčan

The field of statistical machine translation (SMT) has been recently energized by the emergence of huge amounts of parallel data and statistical techniques, which brought automatic language translation closer to professional translators. In the reality, research in machine translation (example-based, rule-based or phrase-based SMT) is not limited to only high-quality translations. If the task is to understand the meaning of a text or to get a quick overview of it, often a rough translation is sufficient enough. Because it is still impossible to build one system which can translate all languages or all domains between languages, machine translation today serves essentially as a basis for post-editing by (human) translators or computer aided translation (CAT). The talk will give a basic overview of how SMT generates translations from a source language to a target language. This overview will include phrase table generation, the importance of a language model and the automatic evaluation in SMT. The talk will conclude with a discussion about the future of SMT.

Statistical Machine Translation Tutorial,

Mihael Arčan

The tutorial will start with an introduction into SMT and how it developed and changed through the history. The first major topic will illustrate the data necessary for the SMT approaches, i.e., from words and sentences to parallel corpora. Next, Word-Based- and Phrase-Based- SMT will be explained, where the main focus will be on modelling the Phrase Translation Table. After introducing the Phrase-Based approach, the third topic will concentrate on Decoding, which is the translating process. Since a language model takes a major part in an SMT system, the next topic will give an insight of this resource. Here we will explain the role of the n-grams, the Markov Chain and improving statistics in a language model with smoothing techniques. The last part of the tutorial will focus on the SMT evaluation. We will discuss the manual evaluation of an SMT output, as well as the Automatic Evaluation. Therefore approaches like Precision and Recall, Word Error Rate (WER), Bilingual Evaluation Understudy (BLEU) and METEOR will be explained.

SDL Trados is the market-leading translation software and hence usually the first point of contact with CAT technologies for large numbers of translators who are just starting to explore the world of computer-assisted translations, as well as a returning point for those who are already proficient in the use of different CAT tools. The seminar will provide a basic overview of the most common features of SDL Trados Studio 2011, and will be a good starting point for subsequent in-depth encounters with the tool that any Trados user will surely need during their professional career. The lecture will cover the basics of CAT technologies and an overview of Trados functionalities: What are the main CAT technologies, how are they used and how do they help us? How to accelerate your translation process in Trados Studio 2011? What are the automated simplification techniques of non-essential procedures that can be used by translators? How far does the compatibility with different file types go? How to efficiently process single files and what to do when you have a multi-file project that you need to turn-around quickly? Trados Studio – translation work simplified – or more complicated?

MemoQ Train – All aboard!,

Jure Dernovšek

In the world of translation tools, MemoQ is becoming a very competitive tool with lots of benefits and it seems that its development is far from finished, because it is constantly offering new and more useful features. The lecture will give an insight into the main characteristics of MemoQ. Through practical examples we will demonstrate: how to effectively translate Microsoft Office files which are still among the most common file types to translate; how to translate miscellaneous file types deriving from other translation tools (Trados, Wordfast, Transit); how to effectively process complex files (.xml) and packages with a lot of files and at the same time ensure consistency which is the crucial quality assurance requirement of most customers; how to effectively translate IDML (InDesign) files using MemoQ preview without the need to have InDesign installed and thus avoid unnecessary costs; how to make the computer do all the work for us – we shall have a look at the development of machine translation and when to use it. The discussion at the end will offer the opportunity to share experiences and analyse actual practical examples.

Translation and Language Technology,

Damjan Popič

The presentation briefly highlights several milestones in the history of language technology and its major achievements that help facilitate translation in its modern form. In spite of the progress made in this field in many commercial respects, many technological advances have not yet seen commercial implementation, mainly for one reason – the field of language technology has not yet found a suitable means of deploying large amounts of corpus data into interfaces suitable for the needs of translators. Such an interface would allow streamlined access to large corpora and objective data on language use. We present and suggest several possibilities for implementing these technologies into translators’ work environment.

How do you translate 20k video lectures? You don’t, you transLecture them!,

Davor Orlič

Online collections of video material are fast becoming a staple feature of the Internet and a key educational resource. What we are working on at transLectures is a set of easy-to-use tools that will allow users to add multilingual subtitles to these videos. In doing so, they will make the content of these videos available to a much wider audience in a way that is cost-effective and sustainable over the vast collections of online video lectures being generated. transLectures is a European project whose academic and industrial partners represent the fields of language technologies, machine learning and audiovisual services. THe use cases are such as VideoLectures.Net and poliMedia, the language pairs being targeted in this project are EN, SP and SL for transcription, and EN<>SPA, EN<>SL, EN>FR and EN>GE for translation. The end result are subtitles, transcriptions, translations, and later personalisation, contextualisation, descriptions, time alignment, fragmentation, recommendations and more for dataset of 20k academic talks.

Terminology

Translation of the acquis communautaire in the pre-accession period,

Olga Shrestha

The presentation describes the process of translation of the Acquis Communautaire at the Translation Unit of the Government Office for European Affairs with emphasis on the freelance management in the pre-accession period. The structure and objectives of public tender to recruit freelance translators, organisation of work of internal translators and their role in the quality control of outsourced translations are presented. The author further describes problems due to terminological inconsistency of outsourced translations and the measures taken to resolve them, including the use of CAT tools. Finally, compliance with the legislation regulating public tenders is discussed with the emphasis on resolving disputes with external contractors.

Translation within the European institutions

Maksimiljan Gulič will share his insights from his 6-year work experience at the European Commission, the day-to-day translation routine, requirements and peculiarities of translating for the Directorate General for Translation, which is one the largest translation organisations in the world, including legal and terminological continuity in translation, creating parallel authentic legislation in all the official languages of the EU, use of extensive translation memory databases, translation and terminology tools.